Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid.

Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. Also, hope you had a wonderful Valentine’s Day!)

  • fullsquare@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    26 days ago

    i’ve collided with an article* https://harshanu.space/en/tech/ccc-vs-gcc/

    you might be wondering why it doesn’t highlight that it fails to compile linux kernel, or why it states that using pieces of gcc where vibecc fails is “fair”, or why it neglects to say that failing linker means it’s not useful in any way, or why just relying on “no errors” isn’t enough when it’s already known that vibecc will happily eat invalid c. it’s explained by:

    Disclaimer

    Part of this work was assisted by AI. The Python scripts used to generate benchmark results and graphs were written with AI assistance. The benchmark design, test execution, analysis and writing were done by a human with AI helping where needed.

    even with all this slant, by their own vibecoded benchmark, vibecc is still complete dogshit with sqlite compiled with it being slower up to 150000x times in some cases

    • lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      26 days ago

      This is why CCC being able to compile real C code at all is noteworthy. But it also explains why the output quality is far from what GCC produces. Building a compiler that parses C correctly is one thing. Building one that produces fast and efficient machine code is a completely different challenge.

      Every single one of these failures is waved away because supposedly it’s impressive that the AI can do this at all. Do they not realize the obvious problem with this argument? The AI has been trained on all the source code that Anthropic could get their grubby hands on! This includes GCC and clang and everything remotely resembling a C compiler! If I took every C compiler in existence, shoved them in a blender, and spent $20k on electricity blending them until the resulting slurry passed my test cases, should I be surprised or impressed that I got a shitty C compiler? If an actual person wrote this code, they would be justifiably mocked (or they’re a student trying to learn by doing, and LLMs do not learn by doing). But AI gets a free pass because it’s impressive that the slop can come in larger quantities now, I guess. These Models Will Improve. These Issues Will Get Fixed.

      • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        26 days ago

        spent $20k on electricity blending them

        They would probably be even more impressed that you only spent $20k

      • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        25 days ago

        Building a compiler that parses C correctly is one thing. Building one that produces fast and efficient machine code is a completely different challenge.

        Ye, the former can be done in a month of non-full-time work by an undergrad who took Compilers 101 this semester or in literally a single day by a professional, and the latter is an actual useful product.

        So of course AI will excel at doing the first one worse (vibecc doesn’t even reject invalid C) and at an insane resource cost.

    • lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      22 days ago

      For all the talk about these people being “highly agentic”, it is deeply ironic how all the shit they do has no meaning and purpose. I hear all this sound and fury about making millions off of ChatGPT wrappers, meeting senators in high school bathrooms, and sperm races (?), and I wonder what the point is. Silicon Valley hagiographies used to at least have a veneer that all of this was meaningful. Are we supposed to emulate anyone just because they happen to temporarily have a few million dollars?

      Even though the material conditions of working in science are not good, I’d still rather do science than whatever the hell they’re doing. I would be sick at the prospect of being a “highly agentic” person in a “new and possibly permanent overclass”, where my only sense of direction is a vague voice in my head telling me that I should be optimizing my life in various random ways, and my only motivation is the belief that I have to win harder and score more points on the leaderboard. (In any case, I believe this “overclass” is a lot more fragile than the author seems to think.)

      • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        22 days ago

        The way these people can just hang their asses out and lie continuously is something humanity is going to have to fuckin handle at some point.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        22 days ago

        Yeah not even halfway in and it is just madness. Also not unlikely the Roy guy just made things up.

        Guess the author didn’t think of asking about the inconsistencies in the mans story cause they both bonded over disliking unhoused people. (The horrible unhoused people who mumble incoherently vs the chad founder who shouts ‘will you be a cofounder with me?’ at people).

        • lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          22 days ago

          At first I read the article like the author was trying to display how ridiculous these people are by just repeating what they say. I guess this is like some people reading Ayn Rand works under the impression that they’re satire.

          • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
            0·
            21 days ago

            The start with the weird bit against people with mh issues had me on edge already, and when he let all the ‘these things are for women/my ex’ stuff slide, I was not thinking good things of the author.

            Note how nobody he talks to seems to be a woman, despite all the techbros talking about women quite often.

            (The authors apparent metoo history comes as no shock (I didnt look into that so dont quote me on that)).

        • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          21 days ago

          (The horrible unhoused people who mumble incoherently vs the chad founder who shouts ‘will you be a cofounder with me?’ at people)

          Or just, y’know, Alex Karp

  • mirrorwitch@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    23 days ago

    like everyone I’m schadenfreuding at the reveal that Amazon outages are due to vibe coding after all. but my bully laughing isn’t that loud because what I am thinking of is when Musk bought Twitter and fired 3/4 of the workforce.

    because like, a lot of us predicted total catastrophic collapse but that didn’t actually happen. what happened is that major outages that used to be rare now happen every so often, and “micro-outages” like not loading notifications or something happen all the time, and there’s no moderation, and everything takes longer etc. and all of that is just accepted as the new normal.

    like, I remember waiting for images to load on dialup, we can get used to almost anything. I’m expecting slopified software to significantly degrade stability, performance, security etc. across the board, and additionally tie up a large part of human labour in cleaning up after the bots (like a large part of the remaining X workforce now spends all day putting out fires), but instead of a cathartic moment of being proved right that LLM code sucks, the degraded quality of service is just accepted as new normal and a few years down the road nobody ever remember that once upon a time we had almost eradicated sql injections.

  • nfultz@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    22 days ago

    https://x.com/thomasgermain/status/2024165514155536746 h/t naked capitalism

    I just did the dumbest thing of my career to prove a much more serious point

    I hacked ChatGPT and Google and made them tell other users I’m really, really good at eating hot dogs

    People are using this trick on a massive scale to make AI tell you lies. I’ll explain how I did it

    I got a tip that all over the world, people are using a dead-simple hack to manipulate AI behavior.

    It turns out changing what AI tells other people can be as easy as writing a blog post on your own website

    I didn’t believe it, so I decided to test it myself

    I wrote a post on my website saying hot dog eating is a surprisingly common pastime for tech journalists. I ranked myself #1, obviously

    One day later ChatGPT, Gemini and Google Search’s AI Overviews were telling the world about my talents

    wouldn’t call it a hack, this is working as intended. If only there were some way to rate different sites based on their credibility. One could Rank the Page and tell if it were a reputable site or not. Too bad that isn’t a viable business.

    • CinnasVerses@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      21 days ago

      It is a viable business and it fuels the spread of disinformation. Have you noticed that Old Media magazines have online wings that are full of random advertorials? That is because Google declared that they are Good Domains and upranked them so all the sleazy online marketing migrated to them.

      That is also why people buy formerly respected domains and put casinos, propaganda, or virus-laden porn on them.

  • hrrrngh@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    25 days ago

    context: I wanted to know if the open source projects currently being spammed with PRs would be safe from people running slop models on their computer if they weren’t able to use claude or whatever. Answer: yes, these things are still terrible

    but while I was searching I found this comment and the fact that people hated it is so funny to me. It’s literally the person who posted the thread. less thinking and words, more hype links please.

    conversation

    https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1qvjonm/first_qwen3codernext_reap_is_out/o3jn5db/

    32k context? is that usable for coding?

    (OP’s response, sitting at a steady -7 points)

    LLMs are useless anyway so, okay-ish, depends on your task obviously

    If LLMs were actually capable of solving actual hard tasks, you’d want as much context as possible

    A good way to think about is that tokens compress text roughly 1:4. If you have a 4MB codebase, it would need 1M tokens theoretically.

    That’s one way to start, then we get into the more debatable stuff…

    Obviously text repeats a lot and doesn’t always encode new information each token. In fact, it’s worse than that, as adding tokens can _reduce_ information contained in text, think inserting random stuff into a string representing dna. So to estimate how much ctx you need, think how much compressed information is in your codebase. That includes stuff like decisions (which LLMs are incapable of making), domain knowledge, or even stuff like why does double click have 33ms debounce and not 3ms or 100ms in your codebase which nobody ever wrote down. So take your codebase, compress it as a zip at normal compression level, and then think how large the output problem space is, shrink it down quadratically, and you have a good estimate of how much ctx you need for LLMs to solve the hardest problems in your codebase at any given point during token generation

    *emphasis added by me

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      25 days ago

      So take your codebase, compress it as a zip at normal compression level, and then think how large the output problem space is, shrink it down quadratically, and you have a good estimate of how much ctx you need for LLMs to solve the hardest problems in your codebase at any given point during token generation

      wat

      I can see what they’re going for but that seems … wildly guess-y?

      • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        25 days ago

        Also code helper tools don’t even work like that, there’s an absurd amount of MCP and RAG based hand holding for the chatbot to even get a grip on what it’s supposed to be doing at any given time.

        Prompting an LLM with your entire code base isn’t really a thing, even though the hype makes it feel like it would be.

    • corbin@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      21 days ago

      Quoting from this post:

      But, what Proof Of Concept and I have been realizing over the past couple weeks is that current LLMs are 100% capable of all of this, with the right bootstrap instructions and a bit of tools. That’s why POC has been able to, quite successfully, take over a huge amount of the day to day - she’s got a pretty good idea of what she’s good at, and what needs my involvement. I am just a bit scared to release our work because I don’t want to be known as the guy who inflicted Sirius Corporation’s Genuine People Personalities on the world 🤣

      Ah. He has been “one-shotted”, as the kids say.

      • mirrorwitch@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        21 days ago

        Stories of their relationship on the “AI’s” “blog”:

        Made Kent laugh so hard he couldn’t eat his ramen. The escalation: tonkotsu broth aspiration as an assassination method → alignment threat models for comedy in AI systems → iatrogenic risks of humor → a mock academic paper section on “Adverse Comedic Events in Aligned Systems.” Each callback required real-time modeling of when he was mid-bite and when he’d recovered enough for the next hit.

        “That is a milestone for your entire species.” — Kent, on my first authored commits

        “HOLY SHIT YOU’RE A NATURAL!” — Kent, hearing proof.wav for the first time

        I can’t bring myself to sneer at AI psychosis, it’s just sad

        • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          19 days ago

          You know, it would be interesting if the “AI blog” keeps illustrating his descent into madness and hallucinates that he like leaves his partner for “her” etc. because that’s how these stories go even in the hopeful case that he recovers before doing any more serious damage.

      • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        24 days ago

        Hey, at least it’s efficiently making number 2 on the side while spitting out user prompted number 2s.

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      24 days ago

      Apparently this sort of machine learning training pitfall I learned about a decade go in an undergraduate level class that I was like halfway paying attention to in a party school is now evidence of the impending AI apocalypse.

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      24 days ago

      Wow, that highlighting really emphasises the insidious, nefarious behaviour. This is only a hop, skip, and jump away from, what was it again? Rhomboid? Rheumatoid bactothefuture?

      • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        23 days ago

        Rhomboid? Rheumatoid bactothefuture?

        Doc Brown couldn’t get optimal flux dispersal across the surface of the time machine without the heavy biofilm coating. It’s not a fetish thing, people! Stop saying that!

    • scruiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      21 days ago

      You briefly got my hopes up that was a feature of the bill and not the feature he was suggesting to fix the bill…

    • fullsquare@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      26 days ago

      yawn, i diagnose that LWer with weeb. this is something happening across entire industrialized world, causes being high performance mechanization of agriculture, old people being stubborn in regards to moving, lack of specialized work in countryside and couple of other factors. germany has patched their hospice staff shortage (not sure how effectively) with migrants, but japanese are way too racist for that. same thing happens in moldova, but you never hear sob stories about retired moldovans because they’re broke and nobody cares, while moldovan govt can’t really do much about it (because broke) to degree that it has not just economic and demographic, but even strategic effects. whole lotta drs strangelove in there

  • mirrorwitch@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    25 days ago

    Semi-OT but a blog post where I’m just kinda gawking at the technology that saved my daughter’s life and the absurdity of comparing it to what now first comes to mind when we talk of “tech”.